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I do thinketh
that we can get
to thy point when thy true Art
ist truly maketh
by true Art Machines
since Art
ist simply thy artifact
of thy fact
that thy Neural Matter
maketh
things that other people deem to matter.

Such subjective ist Art
but thy Art
hast parameters
that even thy computer
can comprehend
and depend
upon to produce
artifacts
that one can deduce
as Art.

It’s widely accepted that creativity can’t be copied by machines. Reinforcing these assumptions are hundreds of books and studies that have attempted to explain creativity as the product of mysterious processes within the right side of the human brain. Creativity, the thinking has been, proves just how different people are from CPUs.

But now we’re learning that for some creative work, that simply isn’t true. Complex algorithms are moving into creative fields—even those as nebulous as music A&R—and proving that in some of these pursuits, humans can be displaced.

The algorithm that kindled Novak’s music career belongs to Music X-Ray, whose founder, Mike McCready, has spent the last 10 years developing technology to detect musical hooks that are destined for the charts. When Novak submitted a song to McCready’s engine through the Web, it was graded on a par with classic hits such as “Take It Easy” by the Eagles and Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild.”

Music X-Ray’s algorithms use Fourier transforms—a method of separating a signal from the “noise” of complex data—to isolate a song’s base melody, beat, tempo, rhythm, octave, pitch, chords, progression, sonic brilliance, and several other factors that catch a listener’s ear. The software then builds three-dimensional models of the song based on these properties and compares it with hit songs of the past. Putting a just-analyzed song on the screen with No. 1 tracks of yore shows a kind of cloud structure filled in with dots representing songs. The hits tend to be grouped in clusters, which reveal similar underlying structures. Get close to the middle of one of those clusters and you may have a hit.

McCready’s website and software have now connected more than 5,000 artists with recording deals, and after a long period of shunning him, the A&R industry is regularly using Music X-Ray to find new artists. “I’m finally making friends in the record industry,” McCready says.

Music lends itself naturally to being parsed by algorithms—mathematics is mixed up in every chord, beat, and harmony that we hear. But can computer programming hack something as subjective as grading English papers?

Why, yes. Earlier this year the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation sponsored a $100,000 competition that invited programmers to build the best essay-grading bot possible. The ultimate goal: an algorithm that closely tracks marks given by the most competent human graders. The best of the 159 submissions did exactly that, producing scores nearly identical to those given by a pool of humans. Such a tool could improve the productivity of teachers who must slog through hundreds of student essays. It could also reintroduce essays to a wider set of standardized tests, which have become dominated by multiple-choice questions that can be cheaply scored by machines.

Algorithms won’t only do work that requires a critical eye. They also will create. Narrative Science, a company in Evanston, Illinois, whose founders include journalism and computer science professors from Northwestern University, has built a set of algorithms that take box scores and produce well-styled and grammatically correct sports reports. The Big Ten Network uses the technology to produce stories one minute after a game is over. An article duly punched out by the bot seconds after an Illinois-Indiana football game started like this: “Nathan Scheelhaase threw for 211 yards and three touchdowns and rushed for 95 yards and one touchdown, leading No. 16 Illinois to a 41-20 victory over Indiana on Saturday at Memorial Stadium. Illinois’ (6-0) offense dominated, ripping off huge chunks of yardage.”

Bots can’t yet script prose worthy of awards, but on some metrics of economic importance to publishers—such as number of page views a site registers—bots can be far more productive than any journalist. They can write articles in seconds, even about events that no journalist attended.

So at what point do algorithms produce something really creative, like art? David Cope, a professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, believes we’re nearly there. Cope has been weaving thousands of lines of LISP code into music-making algorithms for 30 years. While his first algorithms produced crude music unfit for public performance, his newer ones have consistently composed classical music that imitates masters like Johann Sebastian Bach so well that people can’t always tell the difference.

Cope feeds music to machine learning algorithms that create new compositions by changing and building on patterns it finds in existing music. Some might call this mere plagiarism. But Cope argues that building upon the past is what great musicians and composers have always done. This, he insists, is creativity.

Cope’s latest algorithm, which he’s dubbed Annie, takes programmed creativity yet a step further. She decides on the musical patterns, the criteria, and ultimately, the path she takes to making music. “The really interesting thing is that I have no idea what she’s going to do sometimes,” Cope says. “She surprises me as much as anybody.”

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"Be Authentically Weird and be Weird
enough to be in a Category of One."

"It's time to shake up staid traditions
in favor of strange experimentation."

Thy Forces of Light
moved at first light
towards a fight
to make thy Dark Lands bright
as thy lands
I do understandeth
was once thy Bright Lands
whose light
was extinguisheth
from within due to innumerable
threats that
were quite terrible.

Thy Dark Cat
was that
consummate politician
and thy Dark Magician
that hath driven thy Light
into flight
into borderlands
as it now stands.

Thy Catapults of Light
set into flight
thy Orbs of Shiny
that wasn't tiny
to decimate
at any rate
thy quite far far away Dark Forces
by that
Dark Cat
at that
Dark Castle.

Thy Shiny Resistance
movement by chance
was calleth thy Shining Path
as it wast by thy path
of thy Powerful Shiny that
thy People would be liberateth
from thy Dark Cat that
trieth to crusheth
all that opposeth.

Thy Path
of thy People to thy Shining Path
wast paveth by thy oppression
in thy Dark Dominion
of thy Dark Cat
that feareth that
Power of Light
that thy Dark Cat
thus fighteth
with all his might.

Machine learning remains a collaboration between man and machine — with the input of each enhancing and extending the other’s powers. So these algorithmic overlords don’t look like the type that want to harvest us for our organs. Unless you count harvesting the human brain’s ability to make decisions and process selections.

Below is just one example of machine-learning technology that has the power to startle and delight — not least because it involves a (posthumous) collaboration with the greatest writer in the English language: William Shakespeare, to create a new sonnet in the Shakespearean style.

Also involved: U.K. startup SwiftKey‘s machine-learning powered word prediction engine. And a living human mind with an ear for poetry.

How was the new sonnet composed? SwiftKey’s engine was trained on the sonnets of Shakespeare, and one of its early staff members, J Nathan Matias — now doing a PhD at MIT Media Lab — wrote a new sonnet choosing words purely from the next-word suggestions generated by the algorithm.

SwiftKey’s keyboard software can normally be found helping (mostly) Android mobile users type faster by learning their slang, syntax and writing style — and applying that learning to populate tailored three next-word predictions. Give the SwiftKey keyboard enough time to get to know how you write and, provided your writing is not akin to James Joycean streams of consciousness, the algorithm will quickly get very good at guessing what next few words you’re likely reaching for.

But — fed with a particular data-set, and with the addition of a poetically minded human agent — this machine-learning engine can evidently be applied as a creative writing tool capable of creating pastiche writings in the style of the author whose original works you first fed to it.

As well as using SwiftKey’s engine, Matias also built a visual authoring interface (pictured above visualising word suggestions in the style of metaphysical poet John Donne) that extends the core machine-learning technology to specifically aid poetry creation. He called this project ‘Swift-Speare‘: aka a set of statistical experiments in “machine-learning-assisted poetry composition”.

“To write good poetry, I needed to know more than what words might come next. I needed to anticipate future predictions – what predictions would be made later if I choose this word over that? So I created this touchscreen interface to visualize future predictions for poetry writing,” Matias tells TechCrunch.

The result? Multiple new works (co-)created in the style of various authors — including the following ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet (which depicts a scorned lover struggling with the disconnect between his ongoing love for the outward appearance of the object of his desire, with the knowledge of rejection/betrayal that belies this surface beauty):

When I in dreams behold thy fairest shade

Whose shade in dreams doth wake the sleeping morn

The daytime shadow of my love betray’d

Lends hideous night to dreaming’s faded form

Were painted frowns to gild mere false rebuff

Then shoulds’t my heart be patient as the sands

For nature’s smile is ornament enough

When thy gold lips unloose their drooping bands

As clouds occlude the globe’s enshrouded fears

Which can by no astron’my be assail’d

Thus, thyne appearance tears in atmospheres

No fond perceptions nor no gaze unveils

Disperse the clouds which banish light from thee

For no tears be true, until we truly see

The work has no single author. It’s a collaboration whose only living human agent, the aforementioned Matias, also now a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University – whose mind was responsible for the final word selections, and thus also for assembling (and dissembling) the poem’s core meaning — describes as requiring an acknowledged role for each of its different agents (i.e. both human and machine).

“The idea of the author is a well known myth within writing and publishing. Just like startups that promote the myth of the genius founder, we reward individuals for collective projects,”

Thy poembot
ist possible
but ist probable
that thy code for such bot
to be thy eloquent bot
would be thy eloquently
complicated.

Thy complicated
code
to write such odes
causeth
some programmers to cheateth
by applying some fine
undivine
interventions
to such odes that I mentioneth

I do wondereth
if my poetic style fed
to such fine
machines
would also gleaneth
such
patterns such
that anyone can writeth
as I writeth.

I do changeth
my poetic style
once in a while
and for a while
I hath been much amuseth
that I writeth
like in thy age of Macbeth.

Paul Thompson has built a C++ script that produces snowballs — poems where every line is a single word, with each successive word one letter longer than its predecessor. "I thought that someone must have created a program to generate these, and I was surprised that I couldn’t find one even after some pretty thorough Googling," Thompson writes on his blog. That led the part-time programmer to develop his own solution. Thompson's code scans through a massive text file of numerous combined works from Project Gutenberg. All character names are ignored as the poem is crafted, as are any foreign phrases included in the source material. His formula also relies on Markov chains to build out the finalized poem, though Thompson readily admits his somewhat elementary approach isn't perfect. "The output will, for the most part, be absolute rubbish," he says. "But there will be wheat in the chaff." We've included one of those eloquent examples below.

A wounded deer leaps highest,
I've heard the daffodil
I've heard the flag to-day
I've heard the hunter tell;
'Tis but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake is almost done,
And sunrise grows so near
sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the despair and
frenzied hope of all the ages.

You can seeketh moar poembots
at thy Bot
or not to Bot
site.

Thy site
thus excite
with thy prospect
of thy Poetic Bots
that fooleth
thyself as thy Bots
do get
to writeth great
poems at any rate.

Ist amazing that we Humans
can
maketh
such Bots
and such Bots
might expandeth
thy reading list
that we must get
thy Reading and Curating Bot
to filter and curate
what ist great
to readeth
before thy Death.

Thy Death
ist hopefully soon abolisheth
by thy Singularity
so that Humanity
can readeth
thy near infinite output
by thy nearly infinite intelligences.

How good are you at telling the difference between words written by a human and words written by a computer? Maybe after taking the Bot or Not test, you'll better understand how research publishers Springer and IEEE managed to miss gibberish papers.

Developed by two Ph.D. candidates at Australia's RMIT Melbourne -- Benjamin Laird and Oscar Schwartz (who's writing a thesis on whether computers can write poetry) -- the Web site is described as a "Turing test for poetry." Alan Turing developed the Turing test to determine whether intelligence is human or artificial.

The site has two modes -- a set test presented to attendees at the Digital Writers Festival in Melbourne from February 13-24; and Free Mode, which allows you to assess poems for as long as you like. The Web site will present a poem, and you have to guess whether it was written by a human poet or a computer program, such as jGnoetry and Ray Kurzweil's cybernetic poet.
...
The line between human and AI poets is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish, as demonstrated by the site's leaderboards, which display the most human-like human poets and the most computer-like computer poets, as well as the most human-like computer poets and vice versa.

we think some of today’s headlines about research on mole rats have gone too far and give a false impression of a non-existent “breakthrough” towards a cancer “cure”.

First, a general point: despite what countless headlines would have us believe, science and medicine rarely progress though such dramatic ‘breakthroughs’, but rather through the steady, persistent drip-drip of good quality research.

Like water on a stone, this continuous flow of research slowly washes away the mystery, and uncovers new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat disease.
Early lab research

More specifically, as far as we can tell, today’s headlines refer to research that was made public in August last year by scientists in Israel (or perhaps to further unpublished work – we can’t tell).

It’s fascinating stuff, but it certainly doesn’t justify claims that “a cure for ALL [emphasis by the Express] cancers is on the way”.

The work is all lab-based and shows mole rats are resistant to things that would normally cause cancer in mice and other rodents. It also shows human cancer cells grown in the lab alongside mole rat cells – or treated with extracts from the cells – are killed off.

That’s all great. But the research is still very far from being developed into a treatment for people, let alone a cure for all cancers.

Overblown headlines

We love to see interesting research being discussed in the media. And lots of the lab work on blind mole rats and naked mole rats is genuinely intriguing.

But we’re concerned such overblown headlines could give cancer patients false hope of a wonder treatment that’s just around the corner.

Or – equally damaging – such recurrent headlines could have the opposite effect of undermining public’s confidence in cancer research. By creating the impression of breakthroughs that then don’t quickly materialise into cures, such stories create an impression that research isn’t working.

The fact of the matter is that cancer research is full of promising leads that end up at a dead end. That’s science. But along the way we learn new things, and build our knowledge of cancer.

And, slowly but surely, we make progress. It’s thanks to research that cancer survival rates have doubled over the past 40 years.

We don’t yet know where this research could lead – but we do know it’s far too early to start talking about cures.

Thy Mole Rat Cancer Research
ist Basic Research
that hast
potential to be applied to thy Humans
but thy Human
Cancer applications ist still far off
and thy far off
thus meaneth
probably years or decades away
I might sayeth.

I do sayeth
that Basic Research
shouldn't be ignoreth
as we can get
things that are unexpecteth
from thy Basic Research.

Thy Institutions that supporteth
Basic Research
will benefiteth
from thy results that are unexpecteth
liketh
that
thy results from thy much Naked Mole Rat.

The animal looks like a newborn hamster – still naked and blind. But it is not a hamster; it is a naked mole-rat and already ten years old. These strange creatures live in the semi-deserts of Africa and have a life-span of up to 25 years.

This way of life is very unusual for mammals: Their subterranean colonies are organised like an insect community around a single breeding queen. The rest of the animals are workers and soldiers. Since September 2008 there is such a colony with 19 animals at the Berlin Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW).

The naked mole-rats did not have to dig their own burrow at the IZW. When they arrived in September 2008 a comfortable tunnel labyrinth with several Plexiglas chambers was waiting for them. At the IZW, unlike in the natural habitat, soldier mole-rats are not required as sentinels at the burrow entrance to guard against enemies. Nevertheless, the workers have a lot to do: They crawl busily over and under each other, moving backwards as fast as they move forward.

They transport huge quantities of straw, paper towels and food, scurrying back and forth between the chambers to constantly refurbish the burrow. Each chamber has its own established function such as storage cupboard, sleeping chamber or toilet. The occupancy of the different chambers changes from time to time.

“The queen has the most attractive job,” says Dr. Thomas Hildebrandt. She is somewhat larger and lighter in colour than her subjects and is therefore easy to recognise. The queen suppresses potential rivals by secreting a messenger substance in her urine that suppresses fertility in other females. When the queen dies a palace revolution ensues, as only one female can ascend to the throne. Fierce fighting may occur – sometimes to the death – to determine who will succeed. The winner now takes on the characteristics of the queen. If the colony does not perish during this crisis, it takes about half a year until the new queen is able to reproduce.

The naked mole can now add an honor to its impressive list of distinctions. The long-living, subterranean rodent has been named Vertebrate of the Year by Science magazine, thanks to the work of University of Rochester biologists Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov.

Science, one of the world's leading journals on scientific research and news, notes that naked mole rats "will never win a beauty contest," but "may hold a lesson or two for humans" when it comes to warding off cancer.

While they may not appreciate the crack about beauty contests, naked mole rats have carved out a reputation for healthy living. They can last as long as 30 years and stay healthy right up to the end -- and that includes never getting cancer. In fact, when naked mole rat cells are induced to form a tumor, the rodents stop the threat almost immediately.

In announcing the Vertebrate of the Year honor, Science cited two research papers published this year, both written by Gorbunova and Seluanov. According to the magazine, one paper explained how a ribosome in naked mole rats "excels at producing error-free proteins," while the other focused on "a supersized version of a complex sugar that…builds up in the spaces between cells and may keep the cells from clumping together and forming tumors."

"The Vertebrate of the Year announcement is ultimately recognition that our work using unconventional animal models is on the same level as other top scientific developments in cancer research," said Gorbunova. "And it shows that the research dollars invested by the National Institutes of Health is money well-spent."

Gorbunova and Seluanov hope their work will one day lead to clinical treatments for preventing or controlling cancer in humans, but they caution that any medical solution is a long way off.

The naked mole rat's lifespan of 30 years is remarkable, as is its natural resistance to cancer. Researchers have now identified a mechanism responsible for the latter: high levels of high-molecular-mass hyaluronan secreted from fibroblasts, which accumulates because of decreased activity of hyaluronan-degrading enzymes.

The most striking of these to begin with was just how long naked mole rats lived. When researchers studied the rodents over a period of years in the lab, they began to notice how few of them ever died. Faulkes has some individuals from the original colony at London Zoo established from nearly 30 years ago. In American labs, there are naked mole rats still going strong – both forwards and backwards – at 32. Closer study revealed that not only did naked mole rats live a long time, they also resisted almost all typical signs of ageing. The queen and her chosen males could continue breeding without any apparently loss of fecundity. There was no menopause. Blood vessels remained in good condition throughout the naked mole rats' life, with negligible loss of elasticity.

One emphasis in Faulkes's work is into muscle conditioning – naked mole rats seem able to maintain near-perfect muscle structure into old age and are able to repair mitochondrial damage in cells, the kind of damage that is the causal factor in any number of human ailments, from senility to heart failure.

Some of these traits appeared to be linked to the particular series of adaptations that the animals had made to their extremely harsh underground environment – the ability to breathe in low oxygen/high CO2 atmospheres that would kill a human, as well as the evolved ability to suppress pain in their skin (acid burns do not make naked mole rats flinch) and, most extraordinarily perhaps, their cancer-free existence (again, apparently unique among mammals).

Last month, new research published in Nature by a group at Rochester University at New York gave an insight into how this tumour-resistant mechanism might work, research that promises, perhaps, to have a profound effect in a human context. Vera Gorbunova, who co-led that research, has been working on the question since 2005. She describes the work by phone as a different, other-end-of-the-telescope kind of approach to applied biology. "Generally, biologists have worked with mice or drosophila fruit flies to test theories because they are comparatively short-lived and have a quick reproductive cycle, which allows you to study effects on many generations," she says. "With this, we went at it in a different way. If you are studying longevity, for example, why not study animals that have evolved such genetic traits to enable them to live a long life and see how they might have done it?"

With her team, she identified the fact that cells of naked mole rats display a very high degree of proximity inhibition – they don't like to grow close together. This inhibition was proved to be the result of a complex sugar called hyaluronan (HMW-HA), which is present in all mammals, filling the gaps between cells, but which naked mole rats produce in abundance. The molecular structure of their HMW-HA is many times larger, and they are slower at recycling it, meaning that the hyaluronan "goo" builds up in a unique way, giving the naked mole rat the ability, among other things, as Faulkes says, of "almost turning a full somersault within its own skin".

The team at Rochester discovered that the presence of the "goo" enabled a gene identified in an earlier study to activate, causing cancer cells effectively to self-destruct and tumours never to form. The goo is a natural by-product of any attempt to grow naked mole rat cells in a Petri dish. Gorbunova suggests that the next step will be "to introduce this into mice, to see if it has the same effect, and the mice achieve greater age, as well as no cancer". After that, human trials may be possible, though there are no plans in place yet; the Nature article produced a great deal of interest but no extra funding.
...
Faulkes says, "we are slowly learning more and more" about the compelling and unique creatures that are rattling endlessly round the tubes around us as we talk. More than a few stubborn mysteries remain, however, including the obvious one: "We have no real idea at all," Faulkes admits, "about why they might be naked."

If I sayeth
I am not
thy bot
or sayeth
I am thy bot
that ist less fun ist it not?

If I am not thy bot
I may have to soon replace
thyself with thy bot
or I may have already replaceth
thyself with thy bot.

Thy poem bot ist interesting project
and to project
ones personality into a machine
ist I do glean
a way to become immortal
and liveth
on thy servers in the net
ast immortal code
that writeth odes.

Will computers ever become conscious, in this sense of access to a subset of the information in the whole system? In a way, they already are. The operating system of your computer is designed so that certain kinds of information are available to the programmer or user
....
That's because any information system, computer or brain, has to work in real time. A device in which every morsel of information had to be easily available at all times to every process would be perpetually lost in thought.
...
So in that sense, computers, now and in the future, are built with a distinction between "conscious" and "unconscious" processing
...
But it's a very different sense of the word "consciousness" that people find particularly fascinating. That sense is [sentience]: pure being, subjective experience, raw feels, first-person present tense, "what it is like" to see red or feel pain or taste salt. When asked to define. "consciousness" in this sense, we have no better answer than Louis Armstrong's when a reporter asked him to define jazz: "Lady, if you have to ask, you'll never know."(Note 9)

How can we ever know whether Alicia is conscious in this sense -- whether there's "anyone home" seeing the world through her camera-eyes and feeling the signals from her pressure sensors? No matter how smart she acts, no matter how responsive, no matter how vehemently she says she is conscious, an Allenby can always insist that she's just a very fancy stimulus-response machine programmed to act [as if] she were sentient. Try as hard as you like, but you will not come up with an experimental test that will refute him.

Perhaps it is some consolation to know that our befuddlement here is not just a technological puzzle but is a piece with some of the deepest problems in philosophy. If I can't know whether Alicia is sentient, how can I know whether [you] are sentient? I [think] you are, and I'm not so sure about Alicia, but maybe I'm just chauvinistic about creatures that are made out of meat rather than metal.
…
Lest you think that the answer is obvious one way or another, ponder these thought experiments. Suppose surgeons replaced one of your hundred billion neurons with a microchip. Presumably you would feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. The chips do what the neurons did, so your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some [other] conscious entity moving in with you?
Suppose that the transporter in [Star Trek] works as follows. It scans in a blueprint of Kirk's body, destroying it in the process, and assembles an exact duplicate out of new molecules on the planet below. When Kirk is beamed down, is he taking a nap or committing suicide?

The head spins in confusion; it's hard to imagine what a satisfying answer to these questions would even look like. But they are not just brain-teasers for late-night college dorm-room bull sessions. The imponderables also drive our intuitions about right and wrong. Was Allenby guilty of destuction of property, or of murder? Does a newborn boy feel pain when he is circumcised, or is his crying just a reflex? What about a lobster boiled alive, or a worm impaled on a fishhook?

These problems won't be solved any time soon, so don't expect someone to tell you with certainty whether a computer will ever be sentient.
...
Perhaps the human mind, a mere product of evolution of one species on this planet, is biologically incapable of understanding the solution. If so, our invention the computer would present us with the ultimate tease. Never mind whether a computer can be conscious. Our [own] consciousness, the most obvious thing there is, may be forever beyond our conceptual grasp.(Note 11)

Consciousness Explained is a 1991 book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett which offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain.
...
The book puts forward a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness, suggesting that there is no single central place (a "Cartesian Theater") where conscious experience occurs; instead there are "various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain".[1] The brain consists of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies";[2] when "content-fixation" takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of one of the sentences that make up the story in which the central character is one's "self". Dennett's view of consciousness is that it is the apparently serial account for the brain's underlying parallelism.

One of the book's more controversial claims is that qualia do not (and cannot) exist. Dennett's main argument is that the various properties attributed to qualia by philosophers—qualia are supposed to be incorrigible, ineffable, private, directly accessible and so on—are incompatible, so the notion of qualia is incoherent. The non-existence of qualia would mean that there is no hard problem of consciousness, and "philosophical zombies", which are supposed to act like a human in every way while somehow lacking qualia, cannot exist.

While emotions are personal and sensitive and unique, it turns out that our brain turns them into standard code and uses objective methods to determine our subjective experiences.

Researchers believe the standard code objectively represents emotions across different senses, situations, and even people.

“We discovered that fine-grained patterns of neural activity within the orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with emotional processing, act as a neural code which captures an individual’s subjective feeling,” said Cornell University neuroscientist Dr. Adam Anderson.

The study is published online in Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers believe the findings provide insight into how the brain represents our innermost feelings — what Anderson calls the last frontier of neuroscience.

However, the new interpretation upends the long-held view that emotion is represented in the brain by activation in specialized regions for positive or negative feelings.

“If you and I derive similar pleasure from sipping a fine wine or watching the sun set, our results suggest it is because we share similar fine-grained patterns of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex,” Anderson said.

“It appears that the human brain generates a special code for the entire valence spectrum of pleasant-to-unpleasant, good-to-bad feelings, which can be read like a ‘neural valence meter’ in which the leaning of a population of neurons in one direction equals positive feeling and the leaning in the other direction equals negative feeling,” he said.

For the study, the researchers presented participants with a series of pictures and tastes during functional neuroimaging, then analyzed participants’ ratings of their subjective experiences along with their brain activation patterns.

Anderson’s team found that valence was represented as sensory-specific patterns or codes in areas of the brain associated with vision and taste, as well as sensory-independent codes in the orbitofrontal cortices (OFC), suggesting, the authors say, that representation of our internal subjective experience is not confined to specialized emotional centers, but may be central to perception of sensory experience.

They also discovered that similar subjective feelings — whether evoked from the eye or tongue — resulted in a similar pattern of activity in the OFC, suggesting the brain contains an emotion code common across distinct experiences of pleasure (or displeasure), they say.

Furthermore, these OFC activity patterns of positive and negative experiences were partly shared across people.

“Despite how personal our feelings feel, the evidence suggests our brains use a standard code to speak the same emotional language,” Anderson said.

Attachments

Ist Hot at thy Plasma Reactor Core.PNG (222.84 KiB) Viewed 9483 times

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Thy Shiny Layers.PNG (60.48 KiB) Viewed 9484 times

"Be Authentically Weird and be Weird
enough to be in a Category of One."

"It's time to shake up staid traditions
in favor of strange experimentation."

Now much off my Tumour
Potions for moar
than a week
and I geeketh
out
on JavaScript without
a doubt
not only to maketh
Strange Art
but also to mastereth
thy Web Programming Arts.

Much read
on another thread
that ROU had
sadly
thy bad back
and I once had
thy bad back too
from too
much sitting in thy comfy office chair
that wast great cause of despair,
physical therapy
and medical therapy.

I hopeth
that ROU's back does get
better
as my back hath been better
after
much long medical break
and at least my back didn't break.

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Much Easy to maketh in HTML 5.PNG (224.18 KiB) Viewed 9479 times

Thy Blue Spiral.PNG (215 KiB) Viewed 9480 times

I maketh stuff like this only with Javascript and HTML 5.PNG (123.95 KiB) Viewed 9482 times

"Be Authentically Weird and be Weird
enough to be in a Category of One."

"It's time to shake up staid traditions
in favor of strange experimentation."

Thy Illuminati
went underground
where thy Naked Mole Rats
are found
and found
thy Naked Mole Rats
open to that
Illuminating Shiny
since thy Shiny
wast irresistible to thy Naked Mole Rats
that
liveth in darkness and thy illuminating
and quite fascinating
societal transformation
occurreth in thy Mole Rat Nation.